>> This does expand the size of the text, but for most of our purposes,
>> this greatly simplifies writing code to process the text.

John> What processing does this simplify, and does it work equally well
John> for Yiddish and Hebrew?

Not having had the opportunity to do any work in Yiddish yet, I can't say. No
serious complaints about our Hebrew support in quite some time might or might
not mean something. Hard to tell.

A common processing example: if we need a comparison or search routine that
treats nominal and contextual forms the same, I don't ask a coder to add
special rules to handle the special cases. I just tell them to ignore control
characters in their algorithm. Opportunities to introduce bugs just got
smaller. If special cases are proven necessary for the task, they are usually
added after the code is working.
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Mark Leisher
Computing Research Lab Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.
New Mexico State University -- Lou Reed
Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL
Las Cruces, NM 88003